December 28, 2013 11:44 AM CSTFebruary 06, 2014 09:52 AM CSTTexans of the Year: Those who answered the call at West

Texans of the Year: Those who answered the call at West

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LM Otero/The Associated Press

Firefighters conduct a search and rescue of an apartment building destroyed the night before by an explosion at a fertilizer plant in West. The residents of West, who tried to save their families and neighbors from an earth-rattling, life-changing fertilizer plant explosion, have been named The Dallas Morning News Texans of the Year.

An extra minute or a spare few inches can mean everything when disaster threatens. Folks in West think about that a lot these days — those tiny increments of space and time that stand between life and death. Around sunset on April 17, fire was consuming a West Fertilizer Co. warehouse just beyond the city’s northeast border. In the precious minutes after the first alarm sounded around 7:27 p.m., emergency personnel had to react without pausing to consider the danger ahead. Flames towered over the town, out of control, unlike anything West had ever seen. Firefighters knew the warehouse housed tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, a potentially explosive chemical. Outside, tanks of toxic anhydrous ammonia gas were in danger of rupturing from the intense heat.

Downwind, within 200 yards, the West Terrace apartments and West Rest Haven nursing home were enveloped in heavy smoke. Hundreds needed to be moved to safety. Someone needed to buy them those tiny increments of space and time.

Firefighters and paramedics, backed by civilian volunteers, put themselves directly in harm’s way on that evening as the dangers grew. Call them heroes, but they’ll deny it. They were just doing what had to be done.

It was 7:51 p.m. when quiet, tiny West became a world news epicenter. A blast powerful enough to kill hundreds left a death toll of 15. Ten were emergency responders whose heroism and self-sacrifice, we believe, delayed disaster and saved lives.

Those who answered the call in West make us proud to be Texans. They are the 2013 Dallas Morning News Texans of the Year.

Reporters and investigators have prodded them for details to the point of exasperation. Yet the survivors paused to retell their stories to this newspaper — not for self-aggrandizement, but to thank their maker, underscore their friends’ heroism and maybe make sense of an unfathomable tragedy.

“We knew it could explode, but we didn’t know it could do that damage that it did,” said Robby Payne, one of the volunteer firefighters at the plant that evening.

Payne, 52, knows death better than anyone else in West. As president of the only funeral home in a town of 2,800 residents, in bereavement cases “probably 95 percent of the time, I know exactly who I’m dealing with,” he said.

But decades in the business couldn’t prepare him for the grief and loss of April 17. Almost everyone around him was killed. The fact that he survived makes him believe more than ever in miracles.

It only took a few minutes of fighting the inferno before the team realized they were outmatched. By 7:40 p.m., barely 10 minutes after arriving at the plant, they called for backup, Payne said. Volunteer firefighters from nearby towns started getting beeper alerts that West needed help.

Then the call went out to get residents to safety. Heavy smoke was blowing over West’s northernmost neighborhoods, and fears were rising that lung-burning anhydrous ammonia gas could be mixed in.

As the flames and heat grew more intense, firefighters talked about pulling back. But Payne said those closest to the blaze wanted to do what they could to tamp it down so other emergency responders could do their jobs.

“The guys that were actually putting water on the fire at the time, I’m sure that was exactly what their intention was,” he said. “You’re just trying to do the best you can to buy as much time as you can to get everybody on the same page and make these decisions — and make them fast.”

Payne was further back, walking between two parked fire trucks, when the warehouse exploded. A big pumper truck provided just enough of a shield.

The blast picked him up and hurled him into a metal tank containing molasses-based livestock feed. He thinks his shoulder crashed into the rock-hard, rounded end of the tank. A photo shows a big dent where he slammed into it.

Colleagues found him unconscious beneath the tank, the molasses mix dripping down on his crumpled, bloodied body. Among his injuries: broken ribs and jaw bone, shattered teeth, a ruptured ear drum, a deep shrapnel wound to the arm. His shoulder was mangled. An ankle was broken. A photo shows him unconscious, neck in a brace, his face pock-marked by flying chunks.

Also on site were West residents Kenneth Matus, 52, and his cousin Jimmy, 53, who built and outfitted West’s fire trucks and often accompanied firefighters to help with any technical issues that might come up. They didn’t have to be there. They just wanted to make sure everything worked at a time when firefighters could least afford an equipment failure.

The fire truck Kenneth Matus helped manufacture wound up shielding him and saving his life. Jimmy was just beyond the truck, killed while video-recording the fire.

The blast threw Kenneth 20 to 30 yards, he said, and nearly ripped his arms from his torso. He is recovering from nerve damage that left his arms paralyzed and numb. Ringing in his ears is still so loud he can’t sleep at night.

But he’s not complaining. “I’m glad for what I’ve got,” Matus said. “Nobody right around me survived.”

A quiver in his voice suggested that Matus is still rattled by what happened. He insists he’s OK.

Payne said he’s getting there. At their therapists’ request, surviving firefighters have tried to get together and talk about what happened, but the sessions haven’t worked out very well.

“It’s just a difficult thing to talk about. We’ve tried. It’s just …,” Payne said, pausing as emotions seemed to well up. “It’s just, some people aren’t ready.”

All hands available

Amanda Atkins, 34, is a mother of five. Four blocks away when the fire erupted, she was taking a certification test with other paramedic trainees at the West Emergency Medical Service building.

Test-takers started fidgeting when emergency calls came into the station, Atkins said, but instructor Rick Coleman kept them on task. The trainees included four volunteer firefighters from nearby towns.

Suddenly, their beepers went off — the signal that West’s firefighters needed backup. Coleman nodded to the four, giving Calvin, Sanders, Chapman and Reed permission to set tests aside and move out.

Over at the fire, two of Coleman’s colleagues, the husband-wife team of Coil and April Conaway, had already dispatched with their ambulance to provide on-site aid to the firefighters. Coil Conaway radioed to Coleman that the smoke and potential of toxic gas were too great. It was time to evacuate nearby residents.

Enough with the testing. Coleman told Atkins and the other trainees to wet down some towels for use as makeshift air filters, and head out to the apartments and nursing home.

Atkins and a colleague, Emberly Ballew, ran straight toward the apartment building, the structure closest to the flames. When they reached the parking lot, Atkins said, everything suddenly seemed to move in slow motion, “just like you see in the movies.”

A blast wave rippled out from the fertilizer plant, blowing her and Ballew off their feet.

Next to Atkins on the street was a four-by-four post, blasted like a cannonball from the now-splintered apartment building. It apparently had slammed into her hip, causing massive bruising on her back and buttocks. When she tried to stand, there was a crunching feeling in her lower leg. Her fibula, next to the shin bone, was shattered.

Atkins limped back to the EMS station, where Coleman wanted all hands on deck. Anticipating massive casualties, he had already begun setting up a triage station.

“You’re walking on it, so you’re good,” Atkins recalled him saying about her leg. Looking back toward the explosion, Atkins zeroed in on the collapsed roof of the nursing home. Certain there would be casualties, Atkins set out again — broken fibula and all — to help with evacuations.

As much as she tried, her injuries cut short her extraordinary drive to help others. Rescuer became casualty.

While Atkins was limping toward West Rest Haven, Dr. George Smith, 66, was inside, covered in rubble and insulation. His back was bleeding from a large gash. Smith had two critical jobs that day — one as medical director of West EMS, the other as medical director of the nursing home.

Moments before the explosion, Smith had ordered personnel to move elderly residents into a common area away from the heavy smoke. It was a prescient decision, one that bought those increments of space and time, and saved lives as windows shattered inward, along with chunks of concrete and jagged metal.

Despite all his team’s emergency drills and scenarios, “you had to throw the plan away” for the multiple crises they now confronted, Smith said. Scores of elderly were injured and trapped under nursing home rubble.

Of the town’s three ambulances, the one operated by April and Coil Conaway was destroyed in the blast. Another, parked down the road from West Fertilizer, was badly damaged. That left only one working ambulance to handle a tsunami of casualties.

The explosion had blown out all the antennas and emergency radio repeaters in West, meaning Smith had no way to summon help from other cities. Smith made his way over to a nearby heliport, where he found a working satellite radio and connected to a dispatcher in St. Louis. That’s how West’s call for help got out to the world.

Did they know?

Did first responders at the plant know an explosion was imminent? According to Mayor Tommy Muska, if anyone knew the risks, it would have been Dragoo, who was West Fertilizer’s plant foreman. Another was Dallas firefighter Harris, who had experience fighting chemical fires.

Some in West have suggested they were fighting valiantly to forestall an explosion, knowing evacuations were in progress.

“I can’t answer what was in their minds. I don’t think we’ll ever know,” Muska said. But Dragoo “knew exactly what was there” inside the warehouse.

Dr. Smith debriefed survivors, concluding that at least some firefighters knew the severe danger. Harris had alerted them, Smith said. “He said: ‘Guys, get the hell out of here. This thing’s gonna blow!’”

April Conaway, who had been there with her husband, confirmed Smith’s account.

They were trying to pull back when most of the 28 to 34 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer inside the warehouse exploded.

April Conaway said she pulled herself up from the ground and looked quickly to her husband. “Selfishly, our first concerns were each other.”

“That’s not selfish!” interrupted paramedic Jean Smith, who had been with the other damaged ambulance down the road.

Muska, 56, who also is a volunteer firefighter, said he and his 29 colleagues had practiced disaster drills involving hazardous chemicals — not because of the fertilizer plant but rather the Union Pacific railroad that runs through the town. There’s a constant dread of a derailment, Muska said, because of tanker cars with hazardous chemicals that roar through several times a day.

Folks knew that ammonium nitrate had been involved in horrific explosions previously, Muska said, but its presence at West Fertilizer just wasn’t on people’s minds.

“We must not be very good learners.”

Stunned survivors

It hurts to be the one who lived, while others died fighting.

Atkins, the EMS trainee, said she spent months in deep depression, similar to what war veterans experience after suffering blast-induced brain injuries. During her worst times, Atkins said, she cut herself.

“There was a time when I did not want to be here anymore,” she recalled. One session with a therapist lasted 8½ hours.

“People tell you to get over it. Move on,” she said. “You never get over it.”

All of them answered the call that evening. A separation of inches and feet, seconds and minutes, determined who would live or die. A survivor is no less a hero. No less a Texan of the Year.

Survivors don’t see it that way. Atkins points to her fallen friend and fellow trainee Perry Calvin as her definition of a hero. She wears a T-shirt emblazoned with his name.

And Payne? “No, I’m not a hero.”

His wife, Carla, sharply disagreed. “He’s definitely a hero. … Somebody who’s willing to go at the drop of a hat. You gave up a lot,” she told him.

Marty Marak, 56, a 20-year veteran firefighter who was hooking up hose about 300 yards away when the fertilizer blew, waved away the hero question as self-indulgent nonsense.

“Somebody’s got to do it. That’s all there is to it.” If anyone’s a hero, Marak said, it’s not him. “The other guys are.”

When the explosion happened, he and another volunteer, C.J. Gillaspie, ran from their position toward the blast to look for survivors. “We didn’t know what had happened. It was real hectic,” he recalled. “A lot of us had to carry our own guys out.”

Darkness fell. Professional firefighters from Waco arrived on the scene to find West volunteers still searching through rubble. Fearing another explosion, the Waco firefighters gently suggested to Marak and the others that it was time to give up, time to leave.

But where to go? The town was blacked out. Most of their homes were destroyed. So they gathered back at the firehouse. And there they sat, stunned, taking in the magnitude of an experience words can’t describe.

“Maybe it was shock, I don’t know. Eighteen-thousand pounds of TNT, that’s what it was equivalent to,” Marak said. “I don’t know about shock, but it was a lot to take in.”

Moving forward hurts

No one remembers the West Volunteer Fire Department ever losing one of its own before in the line of duty. The closest was when Carla Payne’s father died of a heart attack during an emergency call in the 1960s. He was found slumped over the wheel of his truck.

Losing five in a split second is unspeakably devastating. A lot of them grew up together, played sports, attended each other’s weddings.

It was only recently that Fire Chief George Nors Sr. recruited and trained five replacements for those who died. It was time to rebuild, regroup, move forward.

Nors walked out to the station’s big garage, where three replacement red-and-chrome fire trucks sat parked, ready for action. Behind the trucks are a long, wooden bench and series of plywood nooks where each firefighter stores his bunker gear.

In front of the bench, on the concrete floor, Nors surveyed a long line of scuffed and charred lug boots, with thick, insulated pants piled around them. Inside the nooks hung heat-resistant turnout coats and firefighter helmets bearing the West Volunteer Fire Department’s emblem.

Above each nook were the red plaques with white letters bearing the last names of each volunteer.

The job fell to Nors to sever that final physical link to his fallen warriors, the friends he stood beside at West Fertilizer. He had make way for the new recruits, which meant he had to take down the plaques bearing the names Snokhous, Snokhous, Dragoo, Pustejovsky and Bridges.

“That was hard,” Nors said, surveying the length of the bench. He delivered the plaques to the families of the deceased.

Even if they might not have thought of themselves as heroic, he said, “they’re heroes to us.” The best way anyone can honor their memory “is just to make sure it don’t happen again.”

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